Educational initiative to be renamed for UTSA prof

Updated 10:34 am, Monday, August 6, 2012

Photo: Billy Calzada, San Antonio Express-News

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PREP program founder Manuel Berriozabal congratulates student Karla Estrada, of Health Careers High School, who won a scholarship during the PREP Closing Day Assembly at the UTSA Convocation Center on Tuesday, July 31, 2012.

PREP program founder Manuel Berriozabal congratulates student Karla Estrada, of Health Careers High School, who won a scholarship during the PREP Closing Day Assembly at the UTSA Convocation Center on Tuesday,

Around 1,200 middle and high school students gathered at UTSA’s Convocation Center for the PREP Closing Ceremonies. UTSA math professor Manuel Berriozábal founded PREP in 1979.

Around 1,200 middle and high school students gathered at UTSA’s Convocation Center for the PREP Closing Ceremonies. UTSA math professor Manuel Berriozábal founded PREP in 1979.

Photo: Billy Calzada, San Antonio Express-News

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UTSA professor Manuel Berriozabal speaks during the Prefreshman Engineering Program Closing Day Assemblly at UTSA on July 31, 2012.

UTSA professor Manuel Berriozabal speaks during the Prefreshman Engineering Program Closing Day Assemblly at UTSA on July 31, 2012.

Photo: Billy Calzada, San Antonio Express-News

Educational initiative to be renamed for UTSA prof

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The UTSA Convocation Center, a facility no stranger to raucous cheering, might have had its fill last Tuesday when 1,200 middle and high school students converged there for closing ceremonies of the Prefreshman Engineering Program.

PREP was celebrating its 34th summer program, which might have been enough to prompt the whooping and hollering among youths who spent seven rigorous weeks exploring science, technology, engineering and math, now a phenom called STEM education.

They rooted for teammates, teachers and themselves. But no one received quite the sustained ovation as the tall, gangly 81-year-old in a powder-blue seersucker suit, who stooped a bit as he smiled widely and waved back.

It was Manuel P. Berriozábal, a University of Texas at San Antonio mathematics professor who in 1979 founded the nationally recognized summer enrichment program. It was STEM before STEM was cool — and way before it became a response to a national crisis in the 1990s, as U.S. students fell further behind in earning such degrees.

Berriozábal already had noticed it — and something more. Too few Latino students were taking his classes, too ill-prepared to succeed as math and science majors.

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PREP has helped alter the landscape. Almost 33,000 middle school and high school students, the great majority of them Latinos, have attended at least eight local colleges and universities and 23 campuses across the state and now nationally.

Operated by the San Antonio Education Partnership, Café College offers preparation and advice to get San Antonio students into higher education. If there's any opposition to the name change, none appeared at a city hearing last week, where speaker after speaker supported it. San Antonio resident Emma Chapa read letters from her daughters who are former PREP students — one is a San Antonio physician, the other holds a doctorate in environmental public health.

The renaming idea came from Mayor Julián Castro's office. Castro noted in a prepared statement that Berriozábal “has helped shepherd thousands of young people into higher education and made our city more prosperous in the process.”

The professor is used to such accolades. He has had a big, long life that started by being good with numbers.

Berriozábal was born in San Antonio in 1931 of Mexican and German ancestry. His father came from Mexico in 1910, at the start of the Mexican Revolution. Berriozábal's mother was from Kansas City, Mo.

Growing up in Missouri with his mother and a sister after his parents divorced, he excelled at academics.

At Rockhurst College, a Jesuit school that's now a university, the priests who taught him urged him to go further than his goal of becoming a high school math teacher. Finally, Berriozábal told one, “Look, Father, I can't afford to go to graduate school.”

But he was watching an emerging UTSA, and got a job there in 1976. On an earlier visit to San Antonio, he met a “sweet young thing” to whom he now has been married for 37 years.

In his classes, “there just weren't any (Latinos) to speak of,” Berriozábal said. “I started thinking, ‘What do these kids need? What did I get?'”

“I took all the mathematics I could get in high school,” he recalled, which helped develop abstract reasoning and problem-solving skills. “So maybe what I could do,” he said, is “identify achieving kids and have them come to UTSA in the summer and catch up on these skills.”

He had 44 students that first summer, most of them Latinos and African Americans. Renée Watson, now program director for the Bexar County Small, Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise Program, was among them.

The Sam Houston High School student had one other option that summer: hanging out at a recreation center. Choosing PREP “probably changed my life,” she said.

Several episodes kept PREP growing. There was a member of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board who in the late 1970s said UTSA didn't need an engineering program. “When asked why, he said, ‘The Mexican American community is not where engineers come from anyway.'”

“Even though I'm only half Mexican, I still felt insulted by that,” Berriozábal said, and vowed to make PREP eat his words.

“And we did,” he said, adding, “During these years, I was never given much help from UTSA.” That relationship reached its nadir in the early 2000s, when he was demoted from the program and accused of assault by UTSA vice president for community services Jude Valdez.

Berriozábal was eventually cleared. Some of his friends and colleagues bristle at the mention of the painful episode. Several even rejected as unnecessary the use of the word “vindication” to describe the Café College renaming proposal. “Nothing tarnishes his legacy,” said longtime friend Rosie Castro, Palo Alto College's new interim dean of student affairs and the mayor's mother. “To me, there was never anything to be vindicated from.”

Berriozábal is still at work. This summer, three promising PREP students took his Foundations of Analysis class, an intense upper-division course that met five days a week for five weeks, part of Ph.D. PREP, whose mission is to create doctoral STEM candidates.

The professor has no plans to retire. “I'm too young, and I enjoy it very much.”